


Home Is Wherever I'm With You

by blacktail



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch, Can be parental but it's meant shippy, Jesse McCree Has Issues, M/M, Sewing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 19:41:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11088582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacktail/pseuds/blacktail
Summary: Jesse rips his serape. Gabe knows how to sew. He also knows how to take care of people, but Jesse doesn't know how to be taken care of.





	Home Is Wherever I'm With You

**Author's Note:**

> Professional cute and good artist Ria and I were talking about how Jesse would be all "MASTER HAS GIVEN DOBBY A SOCK ;O;" at their Colossal con artist booth. So I wrote it on my phone at the Colossal 2k17 draw meet because I can't draw lmfao

Commander Reyes has seen sadness in the eyes of men.

 

He's seen the loss of soldiers flying home without their comrades. He's seen marriages dissolve as love turns to something harder, colder. He's watched the creep of age set in as children realized they weren't children anymore and they wouldn't have their parents forever. He's seen hollowed out shells of apartments during the war, hollowed out shells of parents didn't think they would outlive their kids.

Hell if Jesse McCree, serape torn and battered in his hands from a hard fight, doesn't look as bereft as aby of them. 

The way Jesse looks up at him damn near breaks Gabriel's heart when he gestures from a few seats over in the transport, hurt and caution in his big brown eyes. That's why he flexes his fingers again for Jesse to give up the serape.

"You ain't gonna throw it away?" The cowboy asks with narrowed eyes. Like no one has ever given back anything they've taken from him. This, his most prized possession, isn't meant to leave his hands. That he's afraid his Commander is going to take away his safety blanket is no surprise. He sounds so much like a kid sometimes, even if Gabe made damn sure he the squad treated him right on his eighteenth.

"No, I'm not throwing it away," Gabe sighs. He isn't half so impatient as he sounds. 

In the end, Jesse's trust and training run out of desert-blown suspicion. He hands over the ripped fabric, red-orange and dusty as a New Mexico sunset. Another step forward. A little more trust. 

The fixing is nothing. Reyes started as a teenager, modifying thrifted clothes even though his parents never struggled to put food on the table or clothes on their boys' backs. It started with threading patches on by hand, graduated to a sewing machine creating something from nothing. He's fixed clothes and Halloween--Gabe's favorite holiday--is always An Affair™. Mending a rip, even gaping as this one is, takes him about ten minutes. 

Finding the ten minutes is the problem. Back from mission he has to debrief with Jack, shower (also with Jack), and sleep like a goddamn rock for about ten hours after. Reyes always falls asleep with a mental to-do list: At the top is fixing Jesse James McCree's adult safety blanket, sub point what stitch to use ( _zig-zag?_ ) and whether he has Burnt Umber thread ( _somewhere in the box, probably_ ).

The ten minutes come at three in the morning Central European Time. It wakes Jack up--

"What are you doing...?" he slurs, the pillow wet where he couldn't drool on Gabe's chest anymore.

"Fixing the kid's thing."

"Carry on."

Jack sighs, goes back to sleep, and Gabriel grumbles because he doesn't need permission to do jack shit, thank you, Strike Commander. His sewing machine hums away with a little light above it until he cuts the string, seals it, and folds the cloth into a neat little square. Jack doesn't complain when Gabe crawls back into bed again. Gabe doesn't complain when that infuriating, gorgeous man starts drooling on him again.

 

He brings it back the next day. Reyes checks in with Pallas, the Black watch AI, and McCree is in the rec room. The team fresh from the mission has forty-eight hours down time and Jesse is passing it by with movies and shitty food he wouldn't be allowed to eat if he hadn't been all but skin and bones when he was recruited. It's the cowboy, a half-demolished bag of Doritos, and a Western remake that came out when Gabe was Jesse's age ( _Wild Wild West_ , starring Willow Smith, 2031). 

McCree looks up when his superior officer enters, straightens immediately, going from a lounging barely-adult to a respectful soldier in almost no time. That isn't what pleases Gabe. No, what gets him is the light in that boy's eyes when he sees what Reyes has in his hands. Gabe needs to shave, he could probably use another shower, but there he is with a square of yellow and red. Jesse goes from at attention to hopping off the couch, springing up like Gabe is the miracle-worker of a doctor bringing his child back to him.

He takes it, opens it up, finds the slashed bit and traces the outside where nary a seam can be seen. He flips it and traces the thread there. Gabe considers leaving as he watches the kid's eyes get bigger. The way Jesse looks at him--

" _Boss._ "

"It was easy."

Clearly, McCree doesn't give a _fuck_ how hard it was. He looks at Gabe like he retrieved the golden fleece and brought it back just to tuck some rowdy-ass delinquent chico in at night. 

Gabe knows, immediately, that no one has ever done something like this for Jesse. So simple, so easy, but more time and effort than anyone deemed him worth without asking anything in return. Or maybe, that no one's treated something so important to him with the respect McCree thinks it deserves.

"Thanks." It's a heavy word spoken down toward the fabric as he throws it around himself. He looks whole again. A grown man man now, but he grips at the patterned edges of it like a child. He still has growing to do. He still has hangups to get over. McCree's heart feels so big in his chest it gets hard to breathe. 

Gabe looks out for him. Pushes Jesse, but never asks more than he's willing to give back. To Reyes this is nothing but to McCree it's the softest kindness anyone has done him in as long as he can remember. The breath he pulls in is more painful than the cold air on a desert night. Tight.

Maybe that's why Gabe pulls him in. Maybe the tightness in Jesse's chest is why his commando officer wraps arms around him and gives him a tight, comforting hug, offers his shoulder when Jesse turns his face against it.

"I got you," Gabe mutters against his hair. His palm is broad and comforting between Jesse's shoulder blade. The cowboy believes him. Straight to his bones he believes it, that Gabe's got him, that this rug won't be pulled out from under him. Wrapped in his own mended serape and someone else's arms he feels it--he finally feels at home.


End file.
